The rose diagram shows only the swells directed at Engabao that coincided with light winds or offshore conditions through a typical September. It is based on 2880 predictions, one every 3 hours. The direction of the spokes show where quality surf generating swell comes from. Five colours illustrate increasing wave sizes. Blue shows the smallest swells, less that 0.5m (1.5 feet) high. Green and yellow show increasing swell sizes and largest swells greater than >3m (>10ft) are shown in red. In each graph, the area of any colour is proportional to how often that size swell occurs.

The diagram indicates that the dominant swell direction, shown by the biggest spokes, was SW, whereas the the most common wind blows from the W. The chart at the bottom shows the same thing but without direction information. For example, swells larger than 1.5 feet (0.5m) coincided with good wind conditions 8% of the time, equivalent to 2 days. Open sea swells exceeding >3m (>10ft) are unlikely to happen in a normal September. Taking into account the proportion of these swells that coincided with forecast offshore winds, and given the fact that Engabao is exposed to open water swells, we think that that clean surf can be found at Engabao about 8% of the time and that surf is messed up by onshore wind 92% of the time. This is means that we expect 30 days with waves in a typical September, of which 2 days should be clean enough to surf.

IMPORTANT: Beta version feature! Swell heights are open water values from NWW3. There is no attempt to model near-shore effects. Coastal wave heights will generally be less, especially if the break does not have unobstructed exposure to the open ocean.